I like the proof here. Note: I've never done any work with sim craft I just know highly respected and contributing members of the WW and other communities support the work thatsimcraft can do, and I very much dislike how you constantly just slam it and call it wrong with absolutely no proof while also completely avoiding the information I was seeking just so you could attempt to get your un-backed point across. You've been completely off-topic to throw an unsupported argument at everyone.

Regen, what you and Schizoide are doing here is putting 100% faith in a simulation that can't possibly take into account every variable. So when someone like Nemesis here says in game he is not finding that the sim holds, you are saying that isn't proof. Don't you see a problem there? Sure, he could be a little nicer about it, but it doesn't change the fact that he is in game and not finding what the simulation says. While you and Schizoide are not in game, and yet you are saying he is wrong based on a sim program that the authors themselves say doesn't do Tiger Strikes correctly.

So who is the onus of proof on here? In game nobody has found proof that DW is better than 2H, because if they did, I'm 100% sure we'd see it here already. So is everyone in game that finds that DW and 2H are approximately equal wrong? Are they stupid? Do they need to L2P? Or, do you and Schizoide at least acknowledge that maybe, just maybe the sim might be a few percentage points off?

I addressed this in the other thread. The 2H vs DW disparity is a scaling issue that isn't noticeable until raid gear. Even in T14H gear it's only 4.8%, and RNG can easily account for 5% one way or the other.

I'm pasting my response there below. Lets follow up here so we don't further pollute the MW thread.

The difference is 4.8% in T14H gear. But remember, this is a scaling problem and nobody has T14H gear. Most people aren't even raiding in 463 gear yet. Simcraft doesn't even have profiles for monks in 463 gear, because nobody bothered to build them. They'll be obsolete very quickly, so why put in the effort?

Anyway, it does have T14N profiles; in T14N gear the difference is only 3.2%. As your gear worsens, the difference narrows. I would expect them to be even closer in 463 and lower gear. The inverse is also true, I posted extrapolated results with added haste and mastery to approximate T15 gear and the gap widens even further.

Okay, so here's what I don't get. Shouldn't we only care about what we can do today? Sure, we can extrapolate what simulates to be better T15 gear, but we don't know if the game is going to have the same rules then.

Granted, it really doesn't matter since T15 will mean new weapons too, so it's not like someone needs to make a decision now that will actually matter in the future, so if it turns out that Blizzard changes something to normalize damage between the two, it's no harm no foul.

So the reality is, as of now they are (for a lack of a better term) equal. So it doesn't matter if someone goes 2H today, because the weapon they choose today has zero impact on whether they'll continue to use that same weapon once new raiding gear comes out.

Hopefully we've all already begun getting T14 items, and many of us will be moving to T14H in the very near future. This disparity shows up in current content. 3.2% in normal mode gear, 4.8% in heroic.

If you take a 2H agility weapon today over a feral druid, I certainly hope you don't expect to get 1H agility weapons over your guild's rogues and enhance shamans later on in T14, because those guys are gonna be pissed off.

Considering this is just data, why did nobody model a monk with current gear? Wouldn't it have been nice for at least validating that the sim was accurate? Why only model for gear that isn't available yet?

Back to being a developer here, but you'd think they'd like to be able to validate that their formulas work properly for 460-ish gear which is readily available even if it's just a sanity check.

We did tons of modeling in the 483/489 PvP gear, because it was purchasable for gold in beta and GC asked us to post parses using that gear on the raid training dummies in Shattrath. Monk profile sim results were primarily validated using that gear because it provided a convenient and 100% available baseline.

Regen, what you and Schizoide are doing here is putting 100% faith in a simulation that can't possibly take into account every variable. So when someone like Nemesis here says in game he is not finding that the sim holds, you are saying that isn't proof. Don't you see a problem there? Sure, he could be a little nicer about it, but it doesn't change the fact that he is in game and not finding what the simulation says. While you and Schizoide are not in game, and yet you are saying he is wrong based on a sim program that the authors themselves say doesn't do Tiger Strikes correctly.

So who is the onus of proof on here? In game nobody has found proof that DW is better than 2H, because if they did, I'm 100% sure we'd see it here already. So is everyone in game that finds that DW and 2H are approximately equal wrong? Are they stupid? Do they need to L2P? Or, do you and Schizoide at least acknowledge that maybe, just maybe the sim might be a few percentage points off?

In what you quoted I said "I have not done any work with sim craft" and his proof goes no farther than the reliability you put in the fact he says "I tried it and its wrong" so there's that. And yes. It may be a few % off here and there on one or more things, but its certainly more reliable than a person simply stating something.

Anyways arguing for or against sim craft is very far from what I created this thread for. And let's assume nemesis is right and they are absolutely identical, that would an should have made it even easier for him to stay on topic and answer my original question - if everything else is identical, how do you compare the weapon damage of the two options in factoring them? I've offered my best guess and never even gotten as much as a "yes that may be right" or "no that's wrong bad logic"

Sim craft may be wrong. And I've never said that it is king. I said it does calculations we cannot. And highly respected and skilled players trust it. The fact that you're defending that guy based solely on his "word" is no better. I know this might sound harsh but at least sim craft shows its results. All we have is him saying that.

Resto Druids are the new top dps for raids; I had one in LFR beat me. Sim craft is wrong.

We did tons of modeling in the 483/489 PvP gear, because it was purchasable for gold in beta and GC asked us to post parses using that gear on the raid training dummies in Shattrath. Monk profile sim results were primarily validated using that gear because it provided a convenient and 100% available baseline.

So, just so I'm clear and I'm going to be a bit dick-ish for effect, they decided to make the first model for a new class that everyone would be looking at and they chose to use a single data point? That's not only weird, it's something you wouldn't expect from people who are trying to accurately map something, in fact its the exact opposite of what you'd expect.

The 460 vendors are freak'n everywhere, why wouldn't they test with that so it could be used to at least map the progress, or as I said before, at least be a sanity check? When smartasses such as myself questioned them, they could say "in 460 gear, DW and 2H are effectively equal, you only start noticing the difference at X". In fact most people, including Nemesis from this thread would probably be happy with that, but instead it's always "DW >>> 2H and if you don't see it that way you're an idiot".

As someone who builds sh!t like this for a living, I am amazed they would only use one data point.

---------- Post added 2012-10-05 at 04:41 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Regen

Sim craft may be wrong. And I've never said that it is king. I said it does calculations we cannot. And highly respected and skilled players trust it. The fact that you're defending that guy based solely on his "word" is no better. I know this might sound harsh but at least sim craft shows its results. All we have is him saying that.

You are missing the point.

You are asking anyone in game who disagrees with a sim, which is not from the game, for proof or you assume they are what, lying? That is just backwards. I agree that a simulator can remove things like human error, but if the simulator isn't right, it doesn't matter if human error is removed because other errors are introduced.

Put it this way, when I worked in the gaming industry, if a regulator came back to me and said that in the real world the random number generator I built wasn't random, I can't tell them they are an idiot because of wrote a sim that says otherwise. In fact, I'd lose my job and possibly face prison time (depending on the severity of what was wrong). The onus would be on me to prove my sim is correct in the face of real world data showing otherwise.

Nobody has backed the sims data so far in game, partially as I'm learning now is that nobody has the gear that the sim used in it's calculations (something people tend to leave out in their argument of why DW > 2H). So you're asking him for proof as to his claims, well the "proof" is that they never modeled someone below ilvl 483 gear so there's nothing to compare it too.

As I said in my other post, I'm amazed that people who care enough about this wouldn't model more than a single data point. It makes no sense.

Who said they used a single datapoint? Anyway, this is going in circles. Good day to you, sir.

You did, a few posts up you said:

Simcraft doesn't even have profiles for monks in 463 gear, because nobody bothered to build them

If you want to leave the conversation, that's fine, but this is what you said, I'm not making it up. Not using a valid data point for lvl 90 monks to create a model of how they work is just dumb. It'd be acceptable if there was plenty of data points, but there isn't. There's one that nobody in game has.

So I decided to check out the code for simcraft this evening, at least it's not some excel spreadsheet, which is good. No doubt the people developing it are working very hard, but I did find it interesting that in the past three days there were six changes to both DW and 2H damage for WW Monks. Probably because they were finding that the simulation wasn't matching in game results or something silly like that.

So do you still want to insist that the sim is right, and everyone else is wrong?

So I decided to check out the code for simcraft this evening, at least it's not some excel spreadsheet, which is good.

This is a stupid statement. I work in finance, and we use Excel sheets for calculations that are way more complex than anything you'd need to figure out weapon damage in WoW. If you think Excel is unsuited for this purpose, you simply cannot use Excel.

No doubt the people developing it are working very hard, but I did find it interesting that in the past three days there were six changes to both DW and 2H damage for WW Monks. Probably because they were finding that the simulation wasn't matching in game results or something silly like that.

Of course the simulations have to be adjusted? That's how calculations work

So do you still want to insist that the sim is right, and everyone else is wrong?

Anecdotal evidence with a single data point is always inferior to a proper simulation. That doesn't mean the simulation is infallible, it just means that it does a better job than some random Joe looking at his recount and assuming his half-arsed deduction is accurate.

---------- Post added 2012-10-13 at 02:33 PM ----------

Regen, what you and Schizoide are doing here is putting 100% faith in a simulation that can't possibly take into account every variable. So when someone like Nemesis here says in game he is not finding that the sim holds, you are saying that isn't proof.